Posts tagged lit

If you think you can pull one of these off and it’s absolutely needed for your story, great! In general, however, try to avoid putting any of these things in your prologue:

• Philosophic ramblings with no action, dialog, or characters
• Vague people doing vague things explained in vague words
• A poem when the rest of the book is prose
• An event that has no bearing on the rest of the plot
• A prophecy that spoils everything
• Evil people sitting around planning
• Evil people sitting around looking nefarious
• Sounds and sensations with no concrete details
• A chase scene (In general, such chase scenes are unnecessary and add no new information to the book as a whole. They’re also cliche.)
• A boring infodump on the backstory of the setting

The other day, I read a book that paused its narrative every so often to talk about the human spirit. Entire disjointed paragraphs existed just so they would make the author sound philosophical in the middle of their fast-paced action-thriller.

Please don’t do this. Your philosophical themes can reveal themselves through the actions of your characters, not through cutesy little quotable paragraphs talking about how “we all suffer hardships” in the middle of a third-person, past-tense book (I’m not kidding. The author literally changed tenses to deliver his sap).

If you can’t realistically work something in the narrative and must stop to talk to your readers instead, scrap it.

On Earth, humans are at the top of the food chain. Occasionally a crocodile or bear will snag one of us, but for the most part, we are the ones doing the killing. We achieved that spot not out of brute strength but through intelligence. 

I, for one, am tired of the differences between humans and animals getting extrapolated to make the differences between humans and elves or aliens.

In science fiction and fantasy, humans are always the cleverest and most creative of the sentient species, even if the aliens were able to invent interstellar travel and arrive on Earth while we still haven’t reached Mars. The dwarves might be physically stronger, but they’re never as ~smart~ as wonderful old humans.

That way of thinking limits the interplay of various sentient species in stories. I would love a story where humans are the slow guys in the galaxy and other species’ technological advancements proceed at far faster rates. 

Just something to mull over if you’re planning a story with human and nonhuman sentients.

One of the best things about writing fiction is that you get to subvert all the terrible cliches that you grew up reading. Maybe, instead of holding a ten-foot sword, your hero is skilled in more practical maneuvers involving realistic weapons. Wonderful. But if this is a sword-and sorcery story, he should at least have either some kind of cool weapon or a good reason not to have one.

While it might surprise the readers if the secret CIA treasure your protagonists have been looking for actually doesn’t exist, it won’t surprise them in a good way. They will feel cheated unless something more interesting than them finding the treasure happens instead. If you don’t want a cliche in your story, and your readers are expecting one, either change it or replace it. Giving people nothing when they expect at least something does not make for good reading.

In a similar vein, if you have something in your story such as dead parents or amnesia, ask yourself if you really need to get rid of your character’s family or backstory. A family of complex characters who help drive the plot along is often more interesting than a protagonist who angsts about their deceased family for half the story.

“Your name is Karkat Vantas. … you speak in a manner that is ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY ORNERY, ALL THE TIME.” -Homestuck

Way too many characters in fiction have a default emotion of “normal” or “bored” or “apathetic.” Maybe that’s the default state of many people, but in fiction, it’s much more fun to read about somebody who’s always angry or nervous or disgusted with the world around them until other emotions intervene.

Having a default emotion for your characters makes writing in voice a lot easier. Instead of (or along with) writing Joey as a child and Sally as a survivor, you could write Joey as cheerful and Sally as tense. 

Remember not to go overboard. There’s a difference between “sad” and “50% of the narrative is angsting.” Be subtle about it. Don’t have lots of specific sentences where your character describes their emotion. Instead, have it pervade their general tone. Remember also to give them other emotions from time to time. “Default” does not mean “only.”

• Resources don’t come from anywhere.  If your characters live in a society where everybody is watched, how in the world do they find the manpower to watch everybody?  If the world is one big city, where does food come from?
• Random strangers don’t notice the plot taking place. If applicable, bystanders might even call the police. 
• The characters don’t match the environment. People are heavily influenced by their societies. Not everybody can be an *omg so kewl rebble* who defies every single expectation (and ends up with a system of morals similar to the system in the author’s society).
• The setting has no influence on the plot. Why’d you choose that setting, then?

Today’s writing tip comes from Hugh Howey, the New York Times bestselling author of the Wool series.

The next time you’re brainstorming for something to write about, try this handy dandy trick. Not only does it help with originating new plots, it’s a great way to take an existing story idea and kick it up a notch. Before I explain the trick, a note about what drives a great story forward.

You may already be familiar with the concept that tension is key for every story. Tension is what ushers the plot along. If you find yourself confused about what happens next, it’s because your characters have lost their motivation. There’s nothing ratcheted up in their world. It’s like a clock that has worn down and needs winding. That’s why you need tension. Whether it’s internal angst or whizzing bullets, a sense that something is wrong will keep you engaged to your characters (and in turn keep your readers engaged to your writing). The trick I’m about to discuss takes this age-old advice about tension, and allows you to craft a world brimming with it before you set down the very first word.

Here’s the trick: When you come up with an idea for a story, the very first thing you should do is take that whiz-bang idea and break it. Turn it on its head. I’ll give you a few examples, and in each one, I want you to pay close attention to where a writer could easily stop and craft a new world or a fascinating character, but where I’m urging you to go a step further, break these conventions, and come up with a story idea that will write itself, one that’s so full of tension the author’s job is simply to follow along as the plot unwinds like a coiled spring.

In brainstorming for HALF WAY HOME, my initial idea was to come up with a method for colonizing distant planets. My solution was that sending living and breathing people would be too expensive (they have to eat, and they generate waste). So what if they were sent as fertilized eggs and grown in vats after they arrived? That was the genesis of the story. It was a cool idea, but not much more than that. There wasn’t any tension. If I told that story, it would simply be a dry account of people settling a foreign planet. Cool, in a geeky way, but not a book begging to be read.

“Breaking” the story entailed thinking of ways the settlement could go wrong. What if not all planets were okay to colonize once the ship arrived? What if a computer had to make a decision on whether or not to land and set up base? What if, out of the thousands of such colonies sent out among the stars, there was one planet where this decision was impossible to make, and the computer vacillated back and forth until it went crazy? What if this colony was half-aborted before it even began, and the people growing in vats were awoken as teenagers with only half of their training and most of their comrades dead? That’s a lot of tension. The story begins to write itself.

Before I write my first sentence, I break each concept as much as I can. I did the same for THE PLAGIARIST. The original idea was that one day we would simulate worlds with such fidelity and clarity that the organisms living within them would evolve language, art, and feel that they were alive and real. Some of us would then log into these worlds and steal virtual art, bring it back into the world, and sell it as their own. That’s the baseline. It’s just a cool idea, but without tension. Well, what if one of these art thieves fell in love with a girl on a simulated world? What if he stopped caring about the art, stopped caring about his real life, and simply wanted to live among these digital denizens?

I didn’t stop there; I kept breaking. Suddenly, his only romantic relationship in the real world is with a girl he’s never met. It’s a relationship over a computer with a real person, while he has a relationship within a computer with a fake one. And more: The world in which his lover lives is set to be destroyed. Here’s where we start the story. We don’t begin with a cool idea and wind our way up to it. We start with a mess and a nightmare — allow the reader to slowly discover what is going on — and then allow the story to unwind from there.

The same is true of WOOL, the short story that allowed me to quit my day job and has sold nearly half a million copies, landing it on the New York Times bestseller list. I began with a source of tension. I didn’t simply tell a story of people living underground in a vast silo; I began with a sheriff exiling himself, a good man walking off to his death. While the reader is catching up and learning the rules of this place, someone is setting off to die and thinking of his departed wife. No buildup. You begin with the world broken and breaking. Put the action and mystery in the very first sentence and beg the reader to strap in and hold on.

All of my story ideas start in this fashion. When I decided to write about zombies, I began by assuming that the zombies still retained all of their memories and emotions, but that they couldn’t stop themselves from eating people. I told the story from their perspective, a completely different perspective. If I was going to write about a world in which magic existed, I might begin by assuming that one day, everyone woke up to discover that magic no longer worked. If I was writing about a secret garden in which fairies lived, I would write about what happens from their perspective when a human stumbles into their world, not a story from a human perspective as they stumble upon fairies. And then I would take those ideas and break them further. What if there was only one person on that formerly magical world who still had their powers? How would the world treat them? What would they do with those powers? How would everyone else feel to have lost their abilities?

The same is true of characters. Don’t plop people into your stories who are normal and whole. Real people aren’t like that! Just as worlds are normally messy and broken, so are those who live in them. They’re more interesting, too. Give them a disability, an old wound, a history of hurts. Give them a goal they can’t possibly hope to accomplish. Imbue them with flaws and mysterious pasts. And when you think you’ve broken them sufficiently, break them some more!

Your story should be about putting pieces back together, not wandering along, looking for something to go wrong. If you give this a try, you might find that the plots write themselves, and that readers are sucked in from the very first line and discover that they can’t let go.